ABSTRACT
This introduction makes a case for a fresh perspective on the principles and practices of early Indian architecture. Defining it broadly to cover a range of space uses, it first argues for architecture as a form of cultural production as well as public consumption. It proposes the adoption of the twin lenses of meaning and community as the analytic for crafting a new cultural history of the endogenous art and science of building across the subcontinent. It emphasizes the need to look beyond the built form to its spirit, beyond aesthetics to cognition, and thereby to integrating architecture with its living contexts. This introductory chapter points to the semantic diversity inherent in premodern conceptions of building, both sacred and secular, unified only by their insistence on meaning and a transcendent validity over and above utility and aesthetics.
